Due to the rapidly growing literature on the phenomenon of life changes and their linkages to certain dimensions of physical and psychological impairment, we are particularly interested in whether life changes predict increases in disorder in a multi-cultural setting. Our two years of research scheduled to be completed by the beginning of the proposed grant period can be built upon to produce a thorough exploration of the topic. We will have a completed analysis of our "rating" survey (a random sample of El Paso adult Mexican Americans, Anglos and Mexicans and a cluster sample of Ciudad Juarez adults, ages 21-60, and will have computed general cultural specific weighting scores reflecting the seriousness with which 95 specific life events are regarded by these populations. We propose to test their predictive ability of illness in these same populations. In the interest of parsimony, we hope that a single weighting scheme will produce similar accuracy of prediction across cultural groups, but we may find that the culture-specific scores work better. Our proposed study design is strengthened by our having at our disposal an unanalyzed cross-sectional survey of the "incidence" of life change and illness in the same population conducted in 1975. We propose to use those data as a "pretest" of our instruments and hypotheses. After revising our instruments and our hypotheses on the basis of this "protest," we plan to conduct a four-stage panel survey on the incidence of life changes and illness in the same cross-cultural populations to develop more accurate causal and predictive models of the linkages of change and illness. Scholastically, information discovered through this research would be an important contribution to the developing literature on the etiology of physical/psychological impairment. Practically, it will help physical and mental health workers in health delivery to ethnically heterogeneous populations.